trying to stop leaks of classified information the white house is out with a national insider threat memo we'll tell you what it says and ask could this be another attempt by the obama administration to target whistleblowers. and everyone loves a parade but some are seeing right after confidential information including social security numbers turned into confetti at the macy's thanksgiving day parade how could this happen some answers coming up. and julian a song has a new book out called the cypherpunks of freedom and the future of the internet will dive into that topic of internet freedom with one of his co-authors and look how the internet is shaping the world.

hey it's monday november twenty sixth four pm in washington d.c. i'm christine for you watching our team. well we want to begin with a closer look at action being taken in the name of u.s. national security but that might hinder government employees ability president obama released a memo last week to the heads of executive departments and agencies about the national insider threat policy basically to help detect threats on the inside employees working inside the government now according to that memo these threats encompass potential espionage of violent acts against the government or the nation and unauthorized disclosure of classified information including the vast amounts of classified data available on interconnected united states government computer networks and system now the concern here though is that this memo might be a larger attempt to silence whistleblowers since one of the provisions restricts

contact between government officials and reporters now to speak more about this is kevin dust bowl of blogger with firedoglake hey there kevin i know you write a lot about whistleblowers and also about the government's attempts to crack down on them now this is really interesting because congress just approved legislation that extends protections for federal employees who want to report wrongdoing talk a little bit about the significance of this recent memo. it's important to note that legislation actually didn't provide the sort of protections that people who are for whistleblowers rights would have hoped they didn't extend it to you now tional security agency employees it just covered the other agencies so here what you see is a focus on national security on clamping down and making sure that the flow of information doesn't take place and it errs on the side of protecting the policies and programs that are being carried out for so-called national security purposes

and this really has a a root in being a response to p.f.c. bradley manning's allegedly of the wiki leaks documents which i think is important to put out for can text purposes because after that they formed a working group and started to put together this activity yeah absolutely seeing as bradley manning was a member of the military and you know is accused of leaking these classified documents this would fall under what the president has said you know needs to be monitored. so it's a what i mean as far as bradley manning i mean this you know took place two years ago or more talk about you know his role and this memo. well what we're seeing is just the slow wheels of bureaucracy turning because this was part of the program

was that you would go back and get these standards and what we're seeing with this memo is the agency is following through with the stablish ing these standards minister proof loise and it goes along with the fact that there's been this leak hysteria in the past months starting in may you had those stories related to the cia sting operation with the underwear bomb plot you had people talking with reporters about the drone program you had people talking about cyber attacks on iran and those stories became really high profile and senators like dianne feinstein or out really raising everyone's attention calling a lot of attention to it making sure that people knew that in her mind this was something very detrimental and i had to be a response so this is just piling on in addition to the hysteria in washington you know see the insider agency moving forward with this task force proposal well

senator ron wyden has been one of the biggest critics of these types of programs even place to hold on the intelligence authorization act for some fiscal year two thousand and thirteen saying quote i think congress should be extremely skeptical of any and he leaks bills that threaten to encroach upon the freedom of the press or that would really reduce access to information that the public has a right to know he goes on to say without transparency an informed public debate on foreign policy and national security topics american voters would be ill equipped to elect the policymakers who make important decisions in these areas really interesting kevin why though do you think it is that when you look up you know lawmakers who are concerned about fourth amendment rights it is such a small group namely senator wyden. well i suppose it has to do with the fact that there are very few senators and even you know congress men who are willing to confront these national security agencies and raise a stink about these different policies you know whether they be warrantless

wiretapping torture or targeted killing programs or whatever might be happening overseas in the way of special operations those things that really deserve scrutiny and oversight there are very few senators in congress people who want to put their careers on the line and challenge military brass intelligence agency heads and say you see this and i think it's very important to make it clear to your viewers that it's already official policy that you would not release classified information if you work at intelligence agency so this is adding an extra layer it's extraneous it's already known to people who work and it's clear that these are just additional mechanisms that make it impossible for intelligence agency employees to speak to the press and it limits it to having only official spokespeople so you have less views on national security out there in the press and so it's now more of the official line and less what lower level people think about the jobs they're being

asked to do yeah and left i'm going to tell to you having a balcony aspect of this and what you think it says that the administration has no qualms about trying to limit the access. well it's important one of the things in this anti leaks proposal is that you wouldn't be able to enter into a contract with your company for i believe the term is as a at least a year and in that there is no definition of media company so it really amounts to your free speech rights if you're an intelligence agency employee being curtailed and we're talking about people who leave agencies former employees so they're no longer working for these institutions so you would have to be quiet and you could talk for a period of time and then you also have you also have the fact that you couldn't talk to people who are lower level and one official spokespeople on background so if you're a journalist what people should understand is usually you can call somebody an agency and talk to them and they can give you basic details about how things work

they may not give you what you want you can report your new story but at least help you understand the way that an agency functions so you can have the right information you need to start to publish the story but haven't just last question i mean a lot of people that hear about this say you know what these protections are needed classified information is that way for a reason when u.s. security is at rest when we're talking about some of these people with some of the most privileged secure information there needs to be a program in place to make sure that they don't take it outside and make it public and therefore put this country at risk kind of separate for us sort of the difference between that leaking classified information and not being able to report wrongdoing. well so the concern would be that right now you have this threat of prosecution if you if you report that something unlawful or corrupt is going on in cover government i think that might actually be the case if you look at the fact

that the obama administration in its first term prosecuted more whistleblowers than any other president in the history of this country so it just it makes it seem like it's pretty obvious that people think it's not just about classified information it's about offending any controversy from big from the government having to face any controversy yeah absolutely the president of course as we saw last week willing to pardon a turkey or even two but not a whistleblower kevin a blogger at firedoglake thanks so much let's shift our attention now to the issue of privacy and take a look at some of the glaring examples of privacy problems that exist as turns out some of the confetti at the macy's thanksgiving day parade was not confetti at all but shredded documents from the nassau county police department and let's just say the shredding doesn't wasn't done very well one young man started to collect it after he noticed something strange on the bits of paper that fell on his friend's

jacket here's a bit from a local news report with more details. she looked at offered and says i send and then there's a number and it's you know written like a social security number and i'm like that's really bizarre it looked like this we've blurred out the social security number and other information but it made the college freshman concert so he and his friends picked up more of their phone numbers on it addresses more social security numbers license plate numbers and then we find like all these instant reports from police in fact some of the confetti strips mentioned arrest records and had official police reports so it turns out this so-called confetti also included information about things like mitt romney's motorcade when he was in town for the debate even identified detectives including some who worked undercover i want to talk about this and several other privacy problems with our t correspondent stasia church going to head there on the stasi and what's the reaction to this in new york well look christine for people who have

heard this story it's really hard to get over how ridiculous it sounds because when we think of confetti the first thing that pops into mind are these little round colorful pieces of paper right but as we just saw in that report the ones in question here are long and pretty wide strips of paper that you don't even need to you know put together to be able to read the information that they contain and it's incredible how much information was held in this so-called confetti i mean like you say undercover police and for me no less a presidential candidate's motorcade you know and it was just like hey ok let's throw around this fun pieces of paper it's really people are saying what's next are they going to start selling puzzles as you know christmas gifts so you can put them together and see some sort of secret state secret information it's really ridiculous and some people who are actually concerned are saying what else is out there i mean if it's that easy to have somebody throw around secret information

from the state what else could be out there that people don't know of because another vigilant college student didn't. yeah you give them one point for trying to recycle but negative a thousand points for what was actually being shredded and the way it was being shredded it must have been very strange to see this it is a surprising example of course but let's remember too we are in a digital age so much of what we do not only isn't private but will live on forever take a listen i don't know how many times i have to go on the air and tell people your privacy is not private when it comes to your actions or in line we hear stories like this all the time teachers other people losing their job because of a picture posted on facebook talk a little bit about this on a stasia. well i mean christine we all know that in this day and age anybody who you know to quote george w. bush uses the internet has heard trillions of times that i do you should not be

posting tweeting or e-mailing anything that you would be ashamed to see on a magazine cover because that's how you know private the internet is and we know that with twitter for example even a deleted tweet is there forever with facebook the only photos that you have once posted there they remain on facebook even though if you delete them they are still owned by the company with you know even apps like snap chat for example better been quite popular recently where users are kind of promise that their photos will be destroyed and say ten seconds after the recipient sees them there's still no promise you know nobody made taking snapshots of screenshots illegal so you never know who is going to do that and kind of reveal your private information and of course we're not even getting into the whole area of you know e-mails being monitored and so on it's just really funny that in this kind of self obsessed self centered culture people are tweeting and posting these very personal and private details about themselves thinking they're just sending them to friends or you know

acquaintances but in reality just because these actions are so light and take a couple of seconds to post they're not light at all and kind of quite important consequences and people know this yet one after another fall into these traps and we can talk about this without talking about some of the lessons that people famous people even have learned about sexting one of the most well known examples of course was again anthony weiner the democratic congressman from new york was sending suggestive photos of himself over twitter there was also congressman christopher lee who ended up resigning after sexting a woman on craigslist there is a football player brett farve who's photo we actually can't show you but it was sent along with some graphs graphic text messages to a former playboy model he was speaking to and who can. forget tiger woods whose extramarital affair was made public after his mistress released text messages and voice mails that he had sent so you know these are of course some of the most high

profile examples of how what you do is much harder than ever to hide from but honestly in your reporting on privacy matters i know you've done a lot are people learning to live in this digital world and where do we go from here well in terms of are they learning christine you know apparently not because these examples keep coming up more and more often you know as people get more involved in newer and newer social networking sites so this is something that we're seeing all the time i mean when we're seeing these high profile people when we're seeing you know cia generals obviously not being able to keep their privacy secret online how can anybody else be able to you know learn to do that but in terms of you know where do we go from here it's either people are going to have to be more conservative online you know and try to keep some of these private photos or private messages to themselves which is not likely going to happen as we know of course with all of these examples and many more that we still are probably will be

hearing in the you know months and years to come but maybe the public needs to just kind of relax a little bit and get over it if sexting is now going to be a part of a you know every day reality when social networking is all around us maybe people should start treating it like lightly but also that's something that's not very likely to happen of course because we live in a kind of scandal obsessed society so very likely that anything that comes out there is going to be buzzed about but that's just one of the risks people should take in case of these high profile personalities if they're going to do that those are the consequences and i think you raise a really good point on a study about something that only takes fifteen seconds or a minute people you know it doesn't cross their mind but what gets me and what is just so interesting being here in washington is lawmaker after lawmaker politician after politician doing these scandalous things with digital media and not learning you know from their other coworkers and colleagues who have gone down in scandal they're making the same mistakes at least it makes for exciting times here are the

correspondent honest. well the internet has changed the world in many ways it has made it smaller but it's also made the channels between the government and its citizens much easier to navigate and the more people who use the internet and become reliant on it the more that we as a society are getting closer and closer to a decisive point now the founder of wiki leaks julian assigns argues that the decision we must make as a society is whether the internet will become an instrument of freedom or of oppression he's coauthored a new book called cypherpunks freedom and the future of the internet along with jake about obama jeremy zimmerman and andy mueller mon is a question that many people are actually not asking that very few have explored so we want to take an in-depth look and i'm joined now by one of those authors that jeremy zimmerman hey jeremy thanks for being on the show to talk first a you know this cypherpunk movement i know it's been around for a couple decades now tell me a little bit about the movements mission. the word cypherpunk is

a fun cyberpunk which is a science fiction current which describes a world based on information that predicts the internet in a way and a pun on cyberpunk and cipher would choose encryption of communication was the name of the mailing list in the ninety's that was frequented by the most brilliant huggers programmers people really invented the cryptographic tools we are using today and the political notion of encryption and digital technology was. one of the primary source of concerns for the people in the making these many many things happened on this maybe. and from what i understand right now already there's a whole lot of buzz around this book because it really raises some important questions i guess jeremy what's your hope for people who read this i mean what do you want

the takeaway to be. well i hope that people will understand that we are in a moment of our history and the difference between the two society models that we see one would be a society diary and nightmare in which technology will be used to enslave people to control them to survey and punish them and you know the world. technology will be a service of the individual technology would be used to to access to cultures to share knowledge to get in better contact with democracy to democracy. i guess the difference between the two is the way we handle technology is or relationship as human beings to technology some would say oh i understand nothing about technology i don't really want to know but not knowing that knowledge is a bit like not knowing how to read and write so it is about the sharing of knowledge on why technology matters so much what the very notion of the

architecture of the communication networks we use matters so much why personal data and privacy so paramount's to other fundamental freedom let me kind of take apart what you've just said i mean i think it's very obvious certainly the the the freedom part of the internet the part of the internet that makes the world small that makes it so you know facebook for example you can see your friends living all around the world you know what they're doing so the places they're going the music there and you know that can make it culturally really a neat thing for anyone in this world we saw sort of with the arab spring what twitter did in that realm but you said that you know on the negative aspect the technology could be used to control people and in slaves people what do you mean by that. well that's my point about this is the crucial importance of the notion of architecture of

a communication system when you refer to twitter and facebook those are heavily centralized infrastructure that's are in the hands of private sector it's private corporations we know everything about you and the difference between those centralized service and the decentralized services that everyone can use as well is fundamental one case for governments wants to access the data on a centralized blood phone they just have to to seize the material that just has to issue subpoenas or get court orders and they may access all the state up also all these data are stored in one point can leak some time in the future and then all of the life of people will be exposed so it is really about making the distinction and about it is about who you trust and who you don't and those technical intermediaries of the internet are getting such a crucial role people trust them without even knowing what they're about people

accept those contracts when you subscribe an account on facebook and twitter without even reading them and this is something extremely dangerous when you just imagine for instance you mentioned our brains depend on the regime before falling harvested the bus words of the tunisian citizens by snooping on the communication the power that one government could obtain over its citizens by getting to know in real time what they do on facebook and such websites is tremendous and we have massive examples around the world i think that's a really good point and a lot of people would be surprised to know a lot of people here in the united states it's not just for example ben ali it's not just leaders in other faraway countries i mean there is talk now that even the united states government wanted to you know there was talk that the hamas i believe

twitter page that they wanted to shut that down so talk a little bit about that. of course it's all around the world it's not only in the most brutal dictatorships i mean even russia has recently a blacklist of websites that are censored from the internet and the so-called western democracies play a great role in the surveillance of the communications for instance the french company i mean sold to get the levy off nationwide interception systems that have money store and serve a let all older communications in the in libya so. the governments are increasingly trying to get a hold on the internet that can control communications online and they can use those extremely powerful centralized private companies just meter and book to access their cities in the dark so that the only solution is for people to to to

understand the crucial importance of privacy in the d.c. kristie of online communication and to get into using those encryption tools that allow people to protect themselves their personal that to protect themselves their private communications with strong mathematical tools that the state can break only with extremely difficult and costly efforts yeah a it's almost like the more expansive the internet gets the more these governments are also want their power over it to be expanded is very interesting let me switch gears for a second jeremy i want to talk briefly about your one of your call authors julian assange she has of course been holed up in the ecuadorian embassy in london for months and months now talk a little bit about first of all how he was able to contribute to this book and second of all how what we saw happen with him and with the wiki leaks leaks website sort of is an example of what you guys have spoken about in your buck. yes well.

to me there's no question about it during the syllogism hero and wiki leaks of public interest. is rest since political asylum granted by ecuadorian government actually prove his allegations that the case is not about being extradited to sweden for being heard in this very flaky case of minor rape no the ecuadorian government confirmed the risk is extremely serious that's if you get extradited to sweden you would then be x. ray that extradited to the us where he would probably never exit the country. currently has the whole of the us government against him there is a tremendous majestic storm against him that that's one of. the ration of.

but at the very beginning of it we can be initiated of the very few people who are just using a free and open internet in order to do what they believe was the right thing to do and this is the promise of the free and open internet that these biased since universal where everybody can participate where everybody can innovate where everybody can think of new ways of attempting to change the world and i think that this is this power of the individuals who have free and open internet that cares so much the government and the big dominant operations who are teaming up to attempt to control the internet today certainly some really big questions being asked in your new book cypherpunks at i want to thank you so much for being on the shell jeremy zimmerman joining us from paris france my pleasure. well capital account is up next on our two let's check in with lauren lister to see

what's on the agenda today lauren happy cyber monday christine a happy cyber monday you know i'm kind of over the shopping i feel like there was just so much drawn out over the weekend but that is a trend we're going to talk about because though we've seen images of plenty of people changing money changing hands the reality is that money velocity in this economy is very low so that historic lows in fact we're going to break that down and word of the day but broadly our show i don't know if you talked about egypt christine but the political issues going on are really captured headlines interesting part of this is the financial aspects the stock market plunge after morsi issued those decrees for a new powers ten percent so this is a real issue for for an economy that's struggling and is there a broader trend in the unrest we see there compared to catalonia where there's a secession movement to the u.s. where we see wal-mart workers protesting we're going to discuss in just a couple minutes now some really important questions there that really shows how connected all the markets are thanks lauren is going to do it for us for now but

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